


The Things That We Unearth

by brokenmemento



Category: Grace and Frankie (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-05
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2019-05-18 17:10:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14856797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brokenmemento/pseuds/brokenmemento
Summary: Frankie Bergstein has loved two people during the course of her life. One she devoted forty years to. The other took her completely by surprise.





	The Things That We Unearth

**Author's Note:**

> This idea hit me and I had to go with it. I'm still working on my other fics, the big ten chapter one and a little request fic that has turned out to not be so little. Bear with me, Negitiveoedipus. I haven't forgotten, nor have I not started. It's just...delayed.

Frankie Bergstein, née Mengela, has loved two people during the course of her life. Sol Bergstein walked in with his infectious personality and zest for life, both of which helped to send her heart into overdrive. He was kind, gentle. He let her be herself and didn’t flinch at the quirks she exhibited. If anything, he enhanced them. Their life together was beautiful and rich and vibrant. Until it wasn’t anymore.

To say that she was blindsided by his announcement of being in love with Robert would be an understatement. Her heart that had been sent into overdrive by the prospect of a life with him, the one that had remained beating for him, was shattered into. And if only that had been the only part that ached at the confession. If only that had been the only area that suffered.

Heartache has a way of showing the worst parts of a person, the darkest recesses of thought. When Sol told her who he really was, it was as if her own definition of self had changed. She’d been Sol’s wife, a Bergstein, for four decades. Suddenly, that was all supposed to cease, the parameters of her existence no longer within the boundaries of his life force. Falling in love with Sol had been unfortunate, but not a mistake. Never a mistake. Regardless, she aimed never to let it happen again.

Which is why, when it happened a second time, it took her completely by surprise.

********************

It’s fresh, it’s raw, it’s gaping open and new. The first year, she takes to finding ways of dealing with the silence in the aftermath of a life filled with sound. It has the tendency to want to be cold, barren, lethargic. All adjectives she’s despised and never thought she’d be using to describe her days. Or her roommate. _God_ , she’s seventy years old and has a roommate. Not even a pleasant one at that.

She’s known Grace Hanson for years. Many, many, many years. None of them have been a walk in the park, that condescending air about her now floating in the beach house. She’d say she hates Grace but that would be too easy, too effortless of an emotion to feel. It would be a never-ending knee-jerk reaction to anything the woman said or did.

So really, she doesn’t hate Grace. She just can’t be bothered to pretend she likes her. Maybe it’s the way she delicately picks up her silverware at firm parties, acting like she’ll break a nail if she puts forth any conviction in her eating. Maybe it’s the way that conviction never arrives, Grace only taking a few bites here and there, like no one notices that she’s denying herself. Has denied herself for years, except on the one substance she should have learned to moderate from the get-go. Maybe it’s the way she acts like Frankie’s boys will always pale in comparison to her girls or the ground that they walk on. For these reasons, Frankie gains her as a roommate through chagrin.

When Grace is away on her dates, it’s this time Frankie uses to pilfer. She’s always prided herself on being an amateur sleuth and the old saying goes, “keep your friends close but your enemies closer.” An adage she has always believed in. So it could be this mindset that leads her into the interior of Grace’s walls, the place she lays her head when the day ends.

Frankie finds it as devoid of anything of substance on first glance, as much as the person herself. Never has she seen a room resemble it’s owner more. A few boring picture frames sit on her bedside tables, her grandchildren staring out. None of her offspring though, Mallory and Brianna missing. The bedspread is a generic orange patterned one, nothing over the top like she’d expected. The saddest vase of flowers peers out from behind the bedside frames, looking much like the afterthought it probably was. Like Grace sat it there for no reason.

She makes her way over to her closet, glancing at the ugliest painting she’s ever seen.

“Jesus, where is she getting her artwork from, Goodwill?” Frankie mutters to herself and throws open the doors to the walk in. Clothes, shoes, the basics of every other closet. Nabbing a stool from nearby, she stands atop it and shoves aside boxes with various contents, until she finds one filled with photo albums, yearbooks. The whole life of the woman who puts none of it on display.

Frankie takes a seat, opens the yearbook with 1961 adorning the front. That would have been Grace’s senior year, and hers. Her high school experience had been a positive one for the most part. She’d been just as plucky back then as she is now. Grace on the other hand? She’s a mystery.

Frankie flips open, combing through pages. It hits her that she doesn’t know a Grace that isn’t a Hanson. Hasn’t a clue who she is looking for without the moniker being attached and defining her as Robert’s. She takes to scanning faces, searching for a younger version of the one she’s been seeing for the last few decades.

There, right on the weathered, yellow paper is an image of eighteen-year-old Grace, unsmiling. Her hair is in the style for the time period, the top part of her dress showing her delicate shoulders. Frankie looks to the side at the list of names, finding Grace’s in the row.

“So that’s who you really are,” Frankie says aloud, repeating Grace’s name on the air. Giving life to it again after so long.

She continues to flip, finds her only once more in the group photo of her graduating class. No “Best Dressed,” “Most Likely to Succeed,” or “Most Popular” titles bestowed upon her. Her only other picture, aside from the normal stock, a haunting and minuscule pinpoint of her visage. It’s a tad shocking, considering the woman Grace became.

But, Frankie muses, maybe that is why she is who she is. The uptight, grumpy, overcompensating woman she has turned in to. Maybe she’s been trying to prove all of these faces wrong who didn’t vote for her. Maybe she goes back to high school reunions and has rubbed it into their faces that she married a lawyer, had a huge and fancy house, how her daughters are successful in their own right, how she’s got a Fortune 1000 company kicking the pants off of other beauty product lines. How no one would have thought that of her back then.

As Frankie tucks the yearbook back in its spot, she bets at those same reunions, from now on, Grace will leave out the part about her husband now being an ex and super gay.

********************

By year two, Grace is razing the world with alcohol and emotional self-flagellation. All Frankie can do is watch, shake her head, and wonder where Grace will wake up with her head pressed into tile next. She’s slept with Phil and said some shitty things, so Frankie decides to do her own pot stirring while Grace is on a vodka run. Is honestly half surprised she can even drive, but taking the time to entangle her own feelings with someone hell-bent on destruction seems like a waste.

Frankie’s already found the yearbooks in the closet. There’s nothing in there that will uncover any more of who Grace really is, what makes her tick. If there is one thing she tries to do now, it's figuring out how to upend the woman with the impenetrable interior. Things have improved between the two of them but she longs to know Grace at a level other than the surface.

On the top of her dresser are jewelry boxes and perfume bottles. Frankie picks up a slender, glass bottle and uncaps the lid, inhales. The olfactory of the conundrum of a woman comes floating and it makes something claw in Frankie. It’s the smell she’s caught on the air when Grace got ready for her dates with Guy, at her meeting with Phil. It’s the scent of a woman who knows how to turn every head in a room and leave them wondering where they can line up and follow.

Recapping the lid, she takes to the jewelry box. Piece upon piece, nothing cheap of course. Pearls, chains, pendants, bracelets, rings with chunky rocks. Nothing that Frankie would even consider putting on. She can almost close her eyes and imagine what Grace would choose with certain outfits. The delicate pearls for that evening gown she wore once to the firm Christmas party, fabric clinging to every curve like it never wanted to let go. The gold earring and bracelet set she wore the first time Frankie saw her in her power suit for Say Grace.

Frankie holds the earrings up to her ears, looks in the mirror, shrugs at what she sees and deposits them back where they belong. The next item she picks up, she shakes her head. It’s the diamond-encrusted double band Grace wore for forty years, signifying a farcical marriage. Why on earth has she held onto it? She’d been the one to take Frankie’s off, holding her hand and fingers so gently…

Before Frankie knows what she’s doing, she slips the band on her ring finger. It gleams when the light catches it, still crystal clear and spotless after over a year of not being worn. She holds it out, examines the way it looks on her. To imagine, Robert giving this to Grace and being married to her. To being Grace’s other, her opposite. To Grace’s having someone to tuck herself into at night, to touch her body whenever.

Frankie looks at herself in the mirror again, scoffs at her thoughts. What life must have been like. There’s no way Robert let Grace fold into his form, him reaching out to learn her with wild abandon. He was so busy being an opposite to Sol that Grace drifted through life seemingly oblivious that she was doing it alone. That her marriage she had was circling the drain and had gone down the tubes.

For the first time, maybe ever, Frankie feels sorry for Grace. At least Sol was personable and loving, even if it was split between someone else. Grace hasn’t had it in years.

Frankie removes the band, tosses it in the box, slams down the lid. She’s angry for a woman who hasn’t even mustered it up in herself to be all out infuriated yet. The ring, for as long as Grace keeps it, will symbolize a thing she hasn’t let go of completely.

********************

Frankie hasn’t had time lately to do this, to rifle through Grace’s life because it seems that Grace’s life doesn’t move as fast as it used to. She’s around the house more and acts downright jovial about it. Not like she’s waiting for Frankie to get out as quickly as possible,  halfway even acting like she misses Frankie when a sleepover occurs at Jacob’s here and there.

Tonight though, Grace has gone out with her daughters. A rare event, but one Frankie is glad for nonetheless. Jacob’s made an impromptu trip to Santa Fe and it’s her turn to prowl.

Entering the bedroom, she takes a minute to fully notice how much it’s changed in the last two years. The bed holds more pillows, like Grace uses them to lounge and prop up various parts of her body for comfort. Decor like coral and a wide assortment of flowers now adorn the bedside tables. Novels with bookmarks and bottles with medication waiting to be consumed also sit stacked. Patterned wall art has replaced that god-awful monstrosity that was hanging in its place not so long ago.

It hits Frankie, finally: It looks like someone lives here. Like someone retreats to this space and takes solace in the confines of its walls.

Making her way to the dresser, she sits down in Grace’s chair and looks at the contents lined up neatly on top. Bottles of perfume, jewelry boxes still, a hand mirror and brush combo. These things are inherently not very interesting and would be repetitious to backtrack to, so she takes to opening drawers.

The first one is socks, various types of hosiery. Again, nothing out of the ordinary. Next, Grace’s underthings. Frankie takes her hand and rakes it across the lace and silk, scoffing a bit at the ridiculousness of someone of their age owning things like this. Her fingers can’t help but pick up a lacy, see-through bra and as she twirls it around, a laugh escapes her throat. Yeah, that’s probably a hit with the gentlemen callers she’s had over the years.

But recently, it’s become a little less frequent, her escapades. There isn’t a line of men waiting to schmooze and see what they can get out of Grace. Not like any of them would appreciate the effort Grace goes to. How she spends hours trying to perfect herself, to coif her appearance into something she deems acceptable, only to strip it all away and be left with this.

Doesn’t she know that none of this matters? Doesn't Grace see she’s beautiful without it?

Frankie doubts, otherwise all of this wouldn’t exist. None of the dick heads in Grace’s life see her for who she really is, not like Frankie does. How she’s absolutely radiant when she comes downstairs after a shower, hair wet and a darker shade. How she’s kind and tender when the drawbridge is down, when she lets Frankie enter. That there’s a vulnerability to her when she cries, one which Frankie finds breathtaking.

The men in Grace’s life don’t know how to savor the best parts of her. And yes, maybe the soft curve of her breasts would look lovely in this. They’d still be beautiful even with it gone, soft and worthy of being touched.

As if the intrusive thought wasn’t enough to startle Frankie, what she finds next does, but shouldn’t. It’s sloping outline, the silicone pearls of vivid purple. Frankie inhales a breath as she unearths it from being covered by more of Grace’s intimate wear.

She should have known she’d find it someday. It’s not like she doesn’t have the same version herself but now, it’s been several months since they unboxed the prototypes. She can’t feign ignorance and pretend this hasn’t been used, hasn’t seen and touched parts of Grace that Frankie has, guiltily, wondered about.

And shouldn’t she feel guilt? There’s Jacob and he’s gentle and understanding, strong and lovable. But Grace is those adjectives too, albeit in different ways.

She’s gentle when Frankie is down in her back, touching her shoulder to ask where the Skeflaxin is. She’s understanding, even if she grumbles when Frankie wants to go to the natural grocers on the other side of town because they have the best organic selection. She’s strong when they’re combating incubators and banks and interviews with bloggers for Vybrant. That leaves loveable and somehow, yes, she’s become loveable too. When she’s trying too hard to be funny or smashing Panic Alerts with her shoes. When she’s letting Frankie press against her in the middle of the night because of burglars and guns and maybe both of them pretending that it means nothing.

Something stirs in Frankie, a realization that’s hammering. It pounds and feels incessant. She loves Grace. She loves her and that’s why the looming idea of Santa Fe feels even more like it will choke the life out of her.

The vibrator clatters on top of the dresser at Frankie’s line of thinking, burns into Frankie’s retina with staggering vehemence. This is dangerous, too close to something she’s not ready to define completely. And dammit, there’s Jacob.

Quickly, she touches the object long enough to put it back under the sensual fabrics that’s she also tried not to think about since she opened the drawer. The room narrows and she books it, hoping the air is clearer elsewhere in the beach house.

********************

She leaves after everything, after all of it, and she loathes every second almost. Reality and imagination are far from similar, so utterly opposite that it aches her to the bone. Santa Fe should have been the kind of life someone like her wanted to live. Except when she was inside of it, experiencing it, the only place she really wanted to be was home. And home was 800 miles away, in a space occupied by a woman who created a different kind of ache.

Arriving in La Jolla to find everything changed, it staggered. It was like getting clocked in the jaw unexpectedly or receiving a punch to the gut. Grace’s life was cheesy and pink and full of sex in the vagina with someone who caused bile to rise in the back of Frankie’s throat. So when she was out with Mr. Money Bags, Frankie began to acclimate. To learn again who Grace was, who she had become in the absence of her best friend.  

Now they’re here, together, and Frankie can’t shake how she’s given everything up again for someone who doesn’t feel at a depth she herself goes to. While Grace has changed, it’s taken time to rediscover the morphology of it.

She hasn’t done this since they’ve moved into Walden Villas. It took forever to even reorganize her brain to accept that she was here, about the how’s and why’s. Feeling thrown out in the ocean, cast out to sea. Like she’s been struggling to regain any sort of home she had before, only to give it all up.

Frankie walks into the space Grace now calls hers, a fraction of the areas they used to occupy. Immediately, she feels anger radiate but quells it. Walking over to the bed, she gets on her hands and knees, dedicated to finding _something_. Grace doesn’t strike Frankie as the type to keep things hidden in spots where the rest of the world deems private, but all be damned if there isn’t a small shoe box underneath. Her hands close around it and yank it from the darkness. Flipping the lid off, Frankie sucks in a breath.

There in the box are scattered remnants of their life together. Frankie feels her heart swell as she gently, reverently, touches each one. Pictures of things she had no idea meant as much to Grace as they did to her: them and their getups on “Say Yes” night, a photo of them after the art show with Frankie perched in Grace’s lap, Babe’s party with its mixture of melancholy and celebration, the rainbow color palette of the hot air balloon she stole from Nick. More items: a map with La Jolla marked and various routes to Mission Viejo, the first print ad they spotted in a magazine for the Menage a Moi, divorce papers from the busting up of their marriages, Frankie’s drawings of an early mock-up of their vibrator.

Frankie smiles at each of these things. Even further down, a partially smoked joint which makes her laugh out loud. Moving it aside, she comes face to face with more personal objects, closely connected to her. A flyer for her art show, one of her concert tees she was sure had been misplaced, a paint brush with dried acrylic. Frankie feels her breathing become shallow and then altogether stop at the last item in the box. It’s a photo, one she wasn’t aware existed. It’s her, facing a painting she had been working on for her art show. The lights are soft, a glow around her and her work.

Grace must have taken it and slipped back out without Frankie’s knowledge. Her heart that has been in a vice grip of emotion now begins to flutter. She tries to keep the hope from creeping in, but tendrils of it sneak and wind. Grace had Nick, but could this mean…? Could she actually feel…?

She hears keys in the door. Frantically the items get shoved back into the box and stuffed under the bed again. Her feet carry her as fast as they can out of the room and she tries to sneak past the opening door, to make it look like she’s just coming into the kitchen.

“What were you doing?” her voice asks with Frankie breezing past. Spinning around, she lays eyes upon her. Grace has a questioning look on her face and looks nothing short of stunning. It renders Frankie speechless for a few seconds.

“I, uh. I was just putting up some of your laundry,” she lies and not very convincingly. Grace herself seems dubious.

“Since when do you know where my laundry goes, specifically?”

 _Ever since I started snooping through your business four years ago_ , Frankie thinks. “You may or may not need to switch it around. I kind of just found spots for it.” She hopes that Grace doesn’t go looking because right now, the only thing in disarray is the secret box under her bed.

A pang runs through Frankie’s chest. The box. Should she bring it up to her? She wants to talk about it, what it means, what it could mean in the future. But then she would have to admit she has been going through Grace’s things and that probably wouldn’t turn out very well anyway.

And assuming she did bring it up, what would she say? _I found the box of me, of us, under your bed and it made me feel a lot. A lot, a lot. So much so that I’m pretty sure you might feel the same for me too._

Grace stands by the door and crosses her arms, an eyebrow raised. Frankie fidgets, leans back and forth from her heels to her toes with her hands behind her back. She doesn’t want to ask about where Grace was and who she was with, what her absence could possibly mean. She doesn’t want to hear the stories and pretend she doesn’t feel it everywhere anymore. She doesn’t feel like sharing that she’s been snooping and that Grace is mostly the whole, entire reason she isn’t in Santa Fe still.

It stirs, quietly, somewhere deep within. It’s odd to feel it now, after so many years, but she knows it like the back of her hand. Has been communing with her emotions since the beginning of time. While Sol Bergstein may have gotten to her first and the longest, Grace Hanson has gotten to her and will be her last, she knows. It may not be long because really, how much time could possibly be left? But she knows it will be strong. It will be enough until she closes her eyes and doesn’t open them again.

What twinges, what truly sends anguish coursing through her, is that she has no idea how long it will take before they’re both ready to stand at the precipice of this: together.

********************

Her eyes are closed. They feel like they won’t ever open again. Time has passed and it’s more than she wants. She wishes she had more of it to spare. Her body is older and tired. Tomorrow isn’t guaranteed. When the lips press into hers and warm her to her core, she feels contentment wash throughout. After years of looking, she’s found. If tomorrow doesn’t come, at least she has Grace like this.

“I love you,” she whispers in their bed and against her skin, the curtains blowing in softly with the sea breeze. Perhaps, this is all she can wish for anymore.


End file.
